Malay sketches

Malay superstitions are the survival of a time antecedent to the advent of the gospel of Islam, and their strong hold on the people is only another proof of the conservative tendencies of the race. What was the Faith of Malâya seven hundred years ago it is hard to say, but there is a certain amount of evidence to lead to the belief that it was a form of Brahmanism and that no doubt had succeeded the original Spirit Worship.

I do not propose to attempt to enumerate all the various forms of superstition, their name is legion, but only to describe a few that are both curious and interesting.

I have already referred to what is known as bĕr-hantu, the practice of a kind of witchcraft for the healing of the sick; it reminds one of “casting out devils in the name of Beelzebub the Prince of the devils”—and I might here give some of the incantations commonly spoken by the exorcist, but one will suffice. Here is the translation of a most potent exorcism believed to be efficacious against the malevolent attacks of a thousand lesser demons:

Heigh! thou Spirit whose name is Jin Pari of the Jin Âruah; Rabiah Jâmil was thy mother’s, Imam Jâmil thy father’s name; thou art the grandchild of Hakim Baisuri, the great-grandchild of Mâlim of the Forest. Thou Spirit of the path Lôrin, Spirit of the rising ground Sri Permâtang, Spirit of the ant-hill known as “Piebald Horse.” Heigh! you white ants Sekutânai, why do you, Sekutâpa, flying up stream make me think you are on your way down, and flying down stream give the impression that you are going to the interior?

I know your origin, spawn of Hell’s spouting flame; do not any longer torment this person.

If you disobey, I will curse you by the name of the Most High, saying, “By the Grace of God, by the Grace of God, by the Grace of God.”

The final threat to drive out the demon by using the name of the Almighty is curious as showing how the exorcist seeks by a judicious blending of tradition with his latter-day Faith to get the better of the tormentor.

A very widespread superstition is that certain persons have familiar spirits who will, at the instance of their owners, enter into and plague any one whom it may be desired to injure. These evil spirits are known as Bâjang, Pôlong, Pĕlsit, and Langsûior, the last being a female spirit. They are either inherited or acquired by the practice of witchcraft, and the way in which their possession is brought home to any member of the community is as little reasonable as the “proof” of the exercise of similar powers in the Western witch not so many centuries ago.

Some one in a village falls ill of a complaint, the symptoms of which are unusual; there may be convulsions, unconsciousness, or delirium, possibly for some days together or with intervals between the attacks. The relatives will call in a native doctor, and at her (she is usually an ancient female) suggestion, or without it, an impression will arise that the patient is the victim of a bâjang. Such an impression quickly develops into certainty and any trifle will suggest the owner of the evil spirit. One method of verifying this suspicion is to wait till the patient is in a state of delirium and then to question him or her as to who is the author of the trouble. This should be done by some independent person of authority who is supposed to be able to ascertain the truth.

A further and convincing proof is then to call in a “Pâwang” skilled in dealing with wizards (in Malay countries they are usually men), and if he knows his business his power is such that he will place the sorcerer in one room, and, while he in another scrapes an iron vessel with a razor, the culprit’s hair will fall off as though the razor had been applied to his head instead of to the vessel! That is supposing he is the culprit; if not, of course he will pass through the ordeal without damage.

I have been assured that the shaving process is so efficacious that, as the vessel represents the head of the person standing his trial, wherever it is scraped, the wizard’s hair will fall off in a corresponding spot. It might be supposed that under these circumstances the accused is reasonably safe, but this test of guilt is not always employed. What more commonly happens is that when several cases of unexplained sickness have occurred in a village, with possibly one or two deaths, the people of the place lodge a formal complaint against the supposed author of these ills and desire that he be punished.

Before the advent of British influence it was the practice to kill the wizard or witch whose guilt had been established to Malay satisfaction, and such executions were carried out not very many years ago.

I remember a case in Perak less than ten years ago when the people of an up-river village accused a man of keeping a bâjang, and the present Sultan, who was then the principal Malay Judge in the State, told them he would severely punish the bâjang if they would produce it. They went away hardly satisfied and shortly after made a united representation to the effect that if the person suspected were allowed to remain in their midst they would kill him. Before anything could be done they put him, his family, and effects on a raft and started them down the river. On their arrival at Kuala Kangsar the man was given an isolated hut to live in, but not long afterwards he disappeared.

The hereditary bâjang comes like other evils, the unsought heritage of a dissolute ancestry, but the acquired bâjang is usually obtained from the newly-buried body of a stillborn child, which is supposed to be the abiding-place of a familiar spirit until lured therefrom by the solicitations of someone who, at dead of night, stands over the grave and by potent incantations persuades the bâjang to come forth.

Pôlong and Pĕlsit are but other names for Bâjang, the latter is chiefly used in the State of Kĕdah where it is considered rather chic to have a pĕlsit. A Kĕdah lady the other day, eulogising the advantages of possessing a familiar spirit (she said that amongst other things it gave her absolute control over her husband and the power of annoying people who offended her), thus described the method of securing this useful ally:

“You go out,” she said, “on the night before the full moon and stand with your back to the moon and your face to an ant-hill so that your shadow falls on the ant-hill. Then you recite certain jampi (incantations), and bending forward try to embrace your shadow. If you fail try again several times, repeating more incantations. If not successful go the next night and make a further effort, and the night after if necessary—three nights in all. If you cannot then catch your shadow, wait till the same day on the following month and renew the attempt. Sooner or later you will succeed, and, as you stand there in the brilliance of the moonlight, you will see that you have drawn your shadow into yourself, and your body will never again cast a shade. Go home and in the night, whether sleeping or waking, the form of a child will appear before you and put out its tongue; that seize and it will remain while the rest of the child disappears. In a little while the tongue will turn into something that breathes, a small animal, reptile or insect, and when you see the creature has life put it in a bottle and the pĕlsit is yours.”

It sounds easy enough, and one is not surprised to hear that everyone in Kĕdah, who is anybody, keeps a pĕlsit.

Langsûior, the female familiar, differs hardly at all from the bâjang except that she is a little more baneful, and, when under the control of a man, he sometimes becomes the victim of her attractions, and she will even bear him elfin children.

It is all very well for the Kĕdah ladies to sacrifice their shadows to obtain possession of a pĕlsit, leaders of society must be in the fashion at any cost; but there are plenty of people living in Perak who have seen more than one ancient Malay dame taken out into the river, and, despite her protestations, her tears and entreaties, have watched her, with hands and feet tied, put into the water and slowly pushed down out of sight by means of a long pole with a fork at one end which fitted on to her neck. Those who witnessed these executions have no doubt of the justice of the punishment, and not uncommonly add that after two or three examples had been made there would always ensue a period of rest from the torments of the bâjang. I have also been assured that the bâjang, in the shape of a lizard, has been seen to issue from the drowning person’s nose. That statement, no doubt, is made on the authority of those who condemned and executed the victim.

The following legend gives the Malay conception of the origin of all Jin, hantu, bâjang, and other spirits.

The Creator determined to make Man, and for that purpose He took some clay from the earth and fashioned it into the figure of a man. Then He took the Spirit of Life to endue this body with vitality and placed the spirit on the head of the figure. But the spirit was strong, and the body, being only clay, could not hold it and was reft in pieces and scattered into the air. Those fragments of the first great Failure are the spirits of earth and sea and air.

The Creator then formed another clay figure, but into this one He wrought some iron, so that when it received the vital spark it withstood the strain and became Man. That man was Adam, and the iron that is in the constitution of his descendants has stood them in good stead. When they lose it, they become of little more account than their prototype the first failure.

Another article of almost universal belief is that the people of a small State in Sumatra called Korinchi have the power of assuming at will the form of a tiger, and in that disguise they wreak vengeance on those they wish to injure. Not every Korinchi man can do this, but still the gift of this strange power of metamorphosis is pretty well confined to the people of the small Sumatran State. At night when respectable members of society should be in bed, the Korinchi man slips down from his hut, and, assuming the form of a tiger, goes about “seeking whom he may devour.”

I have heard of four Korinchi men arriving in a district of Perak, and that night a number of fowls were taken by a tiger. The strangers left and went further up country, and shortly after only three of them returned and stated that a tiger had just been killed, and they begged the local headman to bury it!

On another occasion some Korinchi men appeared and sought hospitality in a Malay house, and there also the fowls disappeared in the night, and there were unmistakable traces of the visit of a tiger, but the next day one of the visitors fell sick, and shortly after vomited chicken-feathers!

It is only fair to say that the Korinchi people strenuously deny the tendencies and the power ascribed to them, but aver that they properly belong to the inhabitants of a district called Chenâku in the interior of the Korinchi country. Even there, however, it is only those who are practised in the elĕmu sĕhir, the occult arts who are thus capable of transforming themselves into tigers, and the Korinchi people profess themselves afraid to enter the Chenâku district.

It was my misfortune some years ago to be robbed of some valuable property, and several Malay friends strongly advised me to take the advice of an astrologer or other learned person who (so they said) would be able to give the name of the thief, and probably recover most of the stolen things. I fear that I had no great faith in this method of detection, but I was anxious to see what could be done, for the East is a curious place, and no one with an inquiring mind can have lived in it long without seeing phenomena that are not always explained by modern text-books on Natural Philosophy.

I was first introduced to an Arab of very remarkable appearance. He was about fifty years old, tall, with pleasant features and extraordinary grey-blue eyes, clear and far-seeing, a man of striking and impressive personality. I was travelling when I met him, and tried to persuade him to return with me, but that he said he could not do, though he promised to follow me by an early steamer. He said he would be able to tell me all about the robbery, who committed it, where the stolen property then was, and that all he would want was an empty house wherein he might fast in solitude for three days, without which preparation, he said, he would not be able to see what he sought. He told me that after his vigil, fast, and prayer, he would lay in his hand a small piece of paper on which there would be some writing, into this he would pour a little water, and in that extemporised mirror he would see a vision of the whole transaction. He declared that, after gazing intently into this divining-glass, the inquirer first recognised the figure of a little old man. That having duly saluted this Jin, it was only necessary to ask him to conjure up the scene of the robbery, when all the details would be re-enacted in the liquid glass under the eyes of the gazer, who would there and then describe all that he saw. I had heard all this before, only it had been stated to me then that the medium through whose eyes the vision could alone be seen must be a young child of such tender years that it could have never told a lie! The Arab, however, professed himself not only able to conjure up the scene, but to let me see it for myself, if I would follow his directions. Unfortunately, my grey-eyed friend failed to keep his promise, and I never met him again.

A local Chief, however, declared his power to read the past by this method, if only he could find the truthful child. In this he appeared to succeed, but when, on the following day, he came to disclose to me the results of his skill, he said that a difficulty had arisen because just when the child (a little boy) was beginning to relate what he saw he suddenly became unconscious, and it took the astrologer two hours to restore him to his normal state. All the mothers of tender-aged and possibly truthful children declined after this to lend their offspring for the ordeal.

My friend was not, however, at the end of his resources, and, though only an amateur in divination, he undertook to try by other methods to find the culprit. For this purpose he asked me to give him the names of everyone in the house at the time the robbery was committed. I did so, and the next day he gave me one of those names as that of the thief. I asked how he had arrived at this knowledge, he described the method and consented to repeat the experiment in my presence. That afternoon I went with him to a small house belonging to his sister. Here I found my friend the Chief, his sister, and two men whom I did not recognise. We all sat in a very small room, the Chief in the centre with a copy of the Korân on a reading-stand, near to him the two men, opposite to each other, the sister against one wall and I in a corner. A clean new unglazed earthenware bowl with a wide rim was produced. This was filled with water, and a piece of fair white cotton cloth tied over the top, making a surface like that of a drum.

I was asked to write the name of each person present in the house when the robbery was committed on a small piece of paper, and to fold each paper up so that all should be alike, and then to place one of the names on the cover of the vessel. I did so, and the proceedings began by the two men placing each the middle joint of the forefinger of his right hand under the rim of the bowl on opposite sides, and so supporting it about six inches above the floor. The vessel being large and full of water was heavy, and the men supported the strain by resting their right elbows on their knees as they sat cross-legged on the floor and face to face. It was then that I selected one of the folded papers, and placed it on the cover of the vessel. The Chief read a page of the Korân, and as nothing happened he said that was not the name of the guilty person, and I changed the paper for another. This occurred four times, but at the fifth the reading had scarcely commenced when the bowl began to slowly turn round from left to right, the supporters letting their hands go round with it, until it twisted itself out of their fingers and fell on the floor with a considerable bang and a great spluttering of water through the thin cover. “That,” said the Chief, “is the name of the thief.”

It was the name of the person already mentioned by him.

I did not, however, impart that piece of information to the company, but went on to the end of my papers, nothing more happening.

I said I should like to try the test again, and as the Chief at once consented we began afresh, and this time I put the name of the suspected person on first, and once more the vessel turned round and twisted itself out of the hands of the holders, till it fell on the floor and I was surprised it did not break. After trying a few more I said I was satisfied, and the ordeal of the bowl was over.

Then the Chief asked me whose name had been on the vessel when it moved, and I told him. It was a curious coincidence certainly. I wrote the names in English, which no one could read; moreover, I was so placed that no one could see what I wrote, and they none of them attempted to do so. Then the papers were folded up so as to be all exactly alike, they were shuffled together, and I did not know one from the other till I looked inside myself. Each time I went from my corner and placed a name on the vessel already held on the fingers of its supporters. No one except I touched the papers, and no one but the Chief ever spoke till the séance was over. I asked the men who held the bowl why they made it turn round at that particular moment, but they declared they had nothing to do with it, and that the vessel twisted itself off their fingers against their inclination.

The name disclosed by this experiment was certainly that of the person whom there was most reason to suspect, but beyond that I learnt nothing.

Another plan for surprising the secret of a suspected person is to get into the room where that person is sleeping, and after making certain passes to question the slumberer, when he may truthfully answer all the questions put to him. This is a favourite device of the suspicious husband.

Yet another plan is to place in the hand of a pâwang, magician, or medium, a divining-rod formed of three lengths of rattan tied together at one end, and when he gets close to the person “wanted,” or to the place where anything stolen is concealed, the rod vibrates in a remarkable manner.

A great many Malays and one or two Europeans may be found who profess to have seen water drawn from a kris. The modus operandi is simple. The “pâwang” (I dare not call him conjurer) works with bare arms to show there is no deception. He takes the kris (yours, if you prefer it) from its wooden handle, and, holding the steel point downwards in his left hand, he recites a short incantation to the effect that he knows all about iron and where it comes from, and that it must obey his orders. He then with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand proceeds to gently squeeze the steel, moving his fingers up and down the blade. After a little while a few drops of water fall from the point of the kris, and these drops quickly develop into a stream that will fill a cup. The “pâwang” will then hand round the blade and tell you to bend it; this you will find no difficulty in doing, but by making two or three passes over the kris the “pâwang” can render it again so hard that it cannot be bent.

The only drawback to this trick or miracle is that the process ruins the temper of the steel, and a kris that has been thus treated is useless.

One evening I was discussing these various superstitions with the Sultan of Perak, and I did not notice that the spiritual teacher of His Highness had entered and was waiting to lead the evening prayer. The guru, or teacher, no doubt heard the end of our conversation and was duly scandalised, for the next day I received from him a letter, of which the following is the translation: